Does Facebook advertising pay off? It looks like with some experimentation and refinement, the answer is a definite yes. I answered this for myself this weekend by running 3 different types of ads on Facebook and spending about $85, and we had 26 registrations for $676. A pretty good return on investment no matter how you calculate it!
We had a price increase on Saturday night ($26 -> $30) for one of the races I help direct (Scott Coffee Run, a 1,200 person race in June). So the first ad listed above had the most impact. It also had a strong “call to action” (Sign up quick! Price increase) as we have discussed before in Facebook Promotion ideas.
The middle ad was the worst performing. That was done by clicking on one of those Facebook helpful hints of getting more people to “Like” your page. I would advise staying away from those.
The last ad was targeted to runners in several zipcodes around Moorestown. It did pretty well.
We also used the RunSignUp Facebook Conversion Tracking capability. Facebook’s ad manager is not as good as Google Adwords (but I am sure it will get better), so you can not track exact $ amounts, but you can count the number of conversions – people who check out by completing a registration and hitting the confirmation page. Here is the current report from Facebook, and it confirms that all 26 registrations came from these campaigns.
Our race committee has approved spending $1,000 this year on Facebook promotion. At $30 per registration and an incremental cost of about $10 per runner, we make a gross profit of $20 per additional runner. This means we need to generate over 50 incremental registrations over last year via Facebook. Naturally many of the people who sign up via Facebook have run the race before, but we should get more and more interesting data as we move forward. And we will share it all right here on this blog.
